What are you raving about?

What are you raving about?

Posted Aug 21, 2006 13:24 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: What are you raving about? by alextingle
Parent article: Take notes with Tomboy (Linux.com)

What am I raving about?

I will try to tell you.

Why is it broken?

In very simple terms each application controls it's own copy/paste buffer.

Example:
open up a terminal.
open up gedit.
Highlight some text.
close out terminal.
paste text into gedit.

Oh guess what? Nothing happenned. You have to keep both windows open or you loose your buffer. It just doesn't work in a way that makes sense. It may have made sense 10 years ago, but it doesn't work anymore.

Another example:
We are going to try to do a simple copy paste were we replace some text.
Open up gedit.
Open up a text file.
Highlight the text you wish to paste as a replacement for other peice of text.
Now attempt to replace a different block of text with the text you just highlighted.

You can't highlight it or you will loose your buffer.
You have to now paste into the middle or the right or the left of the text you wish to replace and then manually delete the original text.

Tell me why then nobody has yet been able to create a reasonable clipboard setup for middle click paste yet? There have been dozens of projects to attempt to 'fix' it, and nobody has yet to figure out a reasonable solution.

Try it again with windows-style ctrl-c, ctrl-v.
highlight the text you wish to copy.
ctrl-c
highlight the text you wish to replace.
ctrl-v

Simple.

Highlight middle click paste works great for terminals because the windows-style controls generally mean something other then 'copy' and 'paste'. But otherwise it's just not that usefull. I use it all the time personally purely out of habit, but even then it's still broken and I have to be carefull with what applications I try to use it with and how I use it.

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